Eight Rules For Corporate Social Media

Eight Rules For Corporate Social Media

Integrate social media as part of your overall public-positioning strategy to establish sincerity and legitimacy.

Once feared by corporations, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter now are integral to branding and public relations. The paranoid approach was unsustainable; as the saying goes, you need to fish where the fish are, and customers cluster on these popular platforms. But doing something and doing it right are different things. In a recent book, Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset (McGraw-Hill/available now), author Daniel Diermeier considers reputation maintenance in the digital age. Much of the focus is on crisis management and the reality that CEOs can no longer hide behind press releases when things go wrong. Instead, Diermeier urges leaders to cultivate a “whole company” culture that gets out in front of bad news. Diermeier is the IBM professor of regulation and competitive practice and director of the Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. For more on the book, click here.